In a general household, power is supplied to various electric appliances present in living spaces through a single circuit breaker, and various home electric appliances, such as an induction heating cooker (hereinafter also referred to as “IH cooking heater”), are widely used. The maximum power usage of the induction heating cooker is as high as 4,800 W (or 5,800 W) and occupies a major part of the power usage of the household. Accordingly, various proposals have thus far been made to prevent the circuit breaker from tripping (disconnecting the circuit) when another electric appliance, for example, an air-conditioning apparatus is used at the same time as the induction heating cooker. For example, there has been known a power supply control system configured to output a control signal for supplying power to a plurality of electric appliances, through wired or wireless transmission to the electric appliances. The system includes an information collecting device configured to collect information about power usage of the electric appliance, a determining device configured to determine whether or not power can be supplied to the electric appliance within a predetermined allowable power range based on the information about the power usage collected by the information collecting device, and a device configured to permit power consumption of the electric appliance that the determining device has determined power can be supplied to (see, for example, Patent Literature 1).
Further, along with increasing consciousness of health management, there has been a growing number of cases where an occupant acquires biological data, e.g., blood pressure by the occupant oneself in each household. As a typical example, there has been proposed a system capable of measuring and storing blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature, weight, or other items and displaying the data on a display, to thereby enable health counseling via telephone by transmitting the data to a predetermined hospital. This system includes a measurement unit configured to detect and measure, for example, blood pressure with a sensor and to output the data, a clock unit configured to output data regarding the date, a memory unit configured to store the data from the measurement unit together with the data of the date, a data processing unit configured to process the data stored in the memory unit to convert the data into graphic data, e.g., graphs, a display unit configured to display the graphic data transmitted from the data processing unit, and a control unit configured to control each of the measurement unit, the clock unit, the memory unit, the data processing unit, and the display unit (see, for example, Patent Literature 2).
Still further, in order to enable access from the household to a doctor present at a distant location via a communication device (network) so that the doctor can provide health suggestion information and medical diagnosis information to a user, there has been proposed a health management system including a television set, a center server configured to transmit or receive data via a network, and an information terminal apparatus including a first communication device to be connected to the television set to communicate with the outside via the network and a second communication device configured to communicate with a health measurement instrument. In the system, health measurement data measured in the health measurement instrument is communicated with the second communication device to be accumulated in an information storage device of the information terminal apparatus. The health measurement data is then transmitted to the center server via the network with the first communication device to be accumulated in the center server. A medical institution or a control center for health control accesses the accumulated health measurement data to create diagnosis service information based on the health measurement data. The diagnosis service information is transmitted to the information terminal apparatus via the network to be displayed on the television set, and thus the information is provided (see, for example, Patent Literature 3).